Vox Sentences: Bernie and Kissinger and Churchill, oh my!

Bashar al-Assad agrees to a (highly tentative, likely to collapse) ceasefire in Syria; Bernie and Hillary debate foreign policy; and Kanye West is himself.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

A Syrian ceasefire* (*provisions not applicable to ISIS or al-Qaeda)

Alexandra Beier/Getty

• The US and Russia have reached an agreement to implement a temporary ceasefire in Syria.

  [The Guardian / Ian Black and Kareem Shaheen]

• The ceasefire will not apply to the Islamic State or the Al-Nusra Front, which the US considers terrorist groups and will keep bombing.

  [USA Today / Jim Michaels]

• Party to the agreement are Iran and Saudi Arabia, two chief sponsors of opposite sides in the conflict. Their participation has lent hope that this agreement will succeed where others have failed.

  [Washington Post / Liz Sly]

• The news was greeted with cautious optimism from world leaders.

  [Wall Street Journal / Nour Malas]

• But many key details remain unaddressed, like what time it will begin and who will enforce it.

  [CNN / Dand Ford]

• Most people on the ground in Syria are doubtful that fighting will stop even with a ceasefire.

  [New York Times / Anne Barnard]

• Members of Congress have started voicing skepticism about the deal, saying they don’t trust that Russian President Vladimir Putin will halt his bombing campaign or that President Obama will be able to stop him.

  [Politico / Nahal Toosi]

"No, YOU back the worse war criminal"

Win McNamee/Getty Images

• The consensus coming out of last night’s Democratic debate is that Hillary Clinton performed well, showing off a depth of knowledge on a wide range of policies. But Bernie Sanders didn’t hurt himself, either.

  [Washington Post / David Weigel]

• Sanders attacked Clinton for bringing up former Secretary of State and straight-up war criminal Henry Kissinger’s praise of her leadership style.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• But Sanders named Winston Churchill as the foreign leader who inspires him the most, which is a questionable choice given Churchill's record of rapacious imperialism.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

• Polling on Nevada and South Carolina is still scarce. But one new poll finds Clinton and Sanders tied in Nevada, which comes next.

  [RealClearPolitics]

• Meanwhille, Clinton is running an ad in South Carolina that seeks to tie her to President Obama’s record on guns (which implicitly contrasts her views with Bernie's more pro-gun record). It features the Rev. Anthony Thompson, whose wife, Myra, died in the Charleston church shooting.

  [New York Times / Alan Rappeport]

Kanye West's album release is as weird as you'd expect

GOOD Music / Peter de Potter

• Kanye West debuted his new album, The Life of Pablo, with a surreal party at Madison Square Garden in typical Yeezus fashion.

  [Vox / Caroline Framke]

• On the album, Kanye returns here to some of his most proven forms — gospel choirs, booming bass lines, chopped-up beats.

  [Vanity Fair / Kia Makarechi]

• There are few reviews up yet, but NME's Luke Morgan Britton places it "more towards the mid tier" of Kanye's catalogue.

  [NME / Luke Morgan Britton]

• The album has already been listened to millions of times: More than 20 million people live-streamed Kanye's Madison Square Garden performance on Thursday.

  [Billboard / Dan Rys]

• Taylor Swift has described the album track "Famous" as "misogynistic," which is definitely accurate given the lyric, "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / I made that bitch famous." Kanye, for his part, claims he and Swift came up with that line together.

  [BuzzFeed / Michelle Broder Van Dyke]

MISCELLANEOUS

More and more hospitals are giving guards guns and Tasers — and, unsurprisingly, people with mental illness are getting shot. [NYT / Elisabeth Rosenthal]

• On GitHub, a site where many open source software projects base their development, code written by women is approved at a higher rate than code written by men — but only if no one knows they're women.

  [The Guardian / Julia Carrie Wong]

• In praise of the Lego Star Wars dinosaur toy.

  [Medium / AH Chu]

• Bernie Sanders is often accused of being a lightweight on foreign policy. Larry Korb, the former assistant secretary of defense and liberal foreign policy luminary, makes the case that Sanders is smart enough and serious enough to be commander in chief.

  [Politico Magazine / Lawrence Korb]

• Just how incestuous is your profession? Is it as bad as journalism? Check this interactive to find out.

  [Bloomberg / Adam Pearce and Dorothy Gambrell]

VERBATIM

"The libertarian case for Bernie Sanders is simply that Bernie Sanders wants to make America more like Denmark, Canada, or Sweden … and the citizens of those countries enjoy more liberty than Americans do." [Niskanen Center / Will Wilkinson]

• "A Spanish civil servant who failed to turn up for work for 'at least' six years has been caught after becoming eligible for a long service award … [Friends] said he did go to the office, although not for full business hours every day, and that he dedicated himself to reading philosophy."

  [BBC]

• "The arguments for closing borders appear not just to be arguments for closing borders, but for censorship, voting restrictions, eugenics, internal migration restrictions, and more."

  [Bleeding Heart Libertarians / Jason Brennan]

• "I think there’s a lot to clear up regarding the overwhelmingly negative feedback I received for my short story 'Creative-Writing Beatdown,' about a guy who beats up the other students in his creative-writing class after they are overly critical of his work."

  [New Yorker / Lucas Gardner]

• "To detect the signal they observed they had to be able to measure a periodic difference in the length between the two tunnels by a distance of less than one ten-thousandth the size of a single proton. It is equivalent to measuring the distance between the earth and the nearest star with an accuracy of the width of a human hair."

  [NYT / Lawrence Krauss]

WATCH THIS

Pennies are useless. Here's who's fighting to keep them alive. [YouTube / Matthew Yglesias, Matt Moore, and Gina Barton]

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